My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape . ... Sinc...

supersynthetics

Goldman’s controversial “ABACUS 2007-AC1″ synthetic CDO turns out to be a very complicated deal. This is not your grandfather’s vanilla mezz...

Under the banner of the financial crisis, recent months have seen management threaten departments and jobs in post-92 and Russell group uni...

KCH

The most interesting thing I’ve ever read on the subject of linguistic diversity has nothing to do with immigration; it’s in the late histor...

If there were three simultaneous vacancies on the Supreme Court, Washington would be a war zone, and the volume of direct mail would solve t...

Save Middlesex Philosophy

I've just learned that Middlesex University has decided to close its philosophy department. Those familiar with the distinction of the...

code like a girl

Mooching around online as one does (reculer pour mieux sauter) I find a) a somewhat unfocused piece on the PEN website on a recent conferen...

wha-?

The Schöneberger Kiez is not the prettiest part of Berlin. In fact, you could say it's downright ugly. The streets are full of betting ...

inside out

Not a very appropriate fear for a ballerina, for whom dancing is, by definition, a conscious act of loss. A ballet dancer goes onstage on a ...

quo vadis

The most relevant criticism of the U.S. military's Arabic language training would not, I think, be the quantity or quality of Arabic-lan...

the subject is (no subject)

Dear ClustrMaps user, Many thanks for being a loyal ClustrMaps user for the past year. Now that a year has elapsed since your account http:/...

you can check in any time you want...

The first press accounts of the Apple iPad have been long on emotional raves about its beauty and ease of use, but have glossed over its com...

O/R

In starting our new publishing company we looked hard at what Amazon costs a small publisher, and what it provides in return. We decided it ...

Danta A. Ciampaglia at Forbes on the NYRB Classics.

the hero is a man who becomes

As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Rich...

giftwrap

On The Casual Optimist, a Q&A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the cover for McCarthy's new book, C DW: And were you fam...

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, a...

« J'aimais éperdument la comtesse de ... ; j'avais vingt ans, et j'étais ingénu ; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. ...

the score is as three-dimensional as a sculpture

Terrific interview at the Guardian (from July last year) by Paul Morley, after a year studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music, w...

can we say this

The internet’s greatest achievement is to level, somewhat, traditional divisions of status and authority. Till a few years ago, we were led ...

19 May in Berlin (a friend sends this)

Musikbühne: Rufus Wainwright Seine grandiosen Shows am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz zählen zu den Höhepunkten der Musikbühne, und sie haben eins gez...

rumour abides no contestation

Assuredly, opinion is nothing but a semblance, a caricature of essential relation, if only because it is a system organized on the basis of ...

odds

But the debate has completely changed these numbers. The Tories aren’t the money favourites any more. They and the hung Parliament have eff...

the audacity of Clegg

The Lib Dems are now at 30% according to recent polls - and Linux users are 12% of visitors of PP:

Rimsky-Korsakov helps Mussorgsky, oder?

Book Editor discovers a first book with tantalizing possibilities, but clearly, it’s a mess. The novel it will become exists as much in Book...

what an attractor is all about

It appears that the eigenvalue distribution is an attractor. That is, for a broad range of different input models (distributions of the rand...

great minds think alike

Two Argentinean convicts who escaped from jail evaded capture after disguising themselves as sheep, it was claimed. [Having read the O...

Riders of the N8

Clegg promises to make the drivers of night buses let you get off between stops... Consider the Obama-Clegg parallels. Obama's sensibili...

how to say it

On Language Log , Mark Liberman gives clips of people gamely attempting to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, then a couple of Icelandic speakers p...

beach reads revisited

My ex-husband David, hero of our earlier post on A Beach Read of All Times, draws to my attention a number of inaccuracies. It's not ex...

Mike Burns is hosting a discussion of The Last Samurai on Facebook at Ostraca from today to April 24.

Contenders, Accountants & the Men Who Taxed Them

It's now on the periphery of sporting awareness or interest, but there was once a time—and a very long time it was—when there was no big...

Singh & the BCA

But most damnable is that this case should have taken place in the arena of medicine, where reasonable criticism of each others practises sh...

sun & sand & skarp hedin

A reader in the Netherlands has a friend with a bookstore who might be willing to stock The Last Samurai if an overseas number can be found ...

Ah.

A friend writes: Helen, I have several calls into the publisher(s). The minute I get it figured out, I'll let you know. The customer ...

à la recherche de marcel proust

James McGirk has a Q&A with Lorin Stein, the new editor of the Paris Review, on the Economist's More Intelligent Life blog, here . ...

rendering unto Caesar

About 90% of Americans used either tax preparers or tax-preparation software in 2009. That's insane, particularly when you realize th...

iPad replaces Julie Andrews

Joshua Gans talks about terrific uses of the iPad for children learning to read, learning about music, learning about the periodic table and...

ahem

Andrew Gelman casts a critical eye on John Lanchester's analysis of UK electoral districts and supposed advantage to Labour of these a...

Theophrastus & electioneering

John Lanchester has been writing regularly on the LRB Blog in the run-up to the UK election; today he describes Mosaic, a package used by th...

dolce vita ist vorbei, iii

got the following enchanting announcement from Wu Ming: Questa è l'ultima mail che riceverete perché vi siete iscritt* a Giap, ormai tan...

ben arrivati ad Hameln

Jonathan Galassi has a post on the FSG poetry blog about poetry in translation. Galassi has just finished translating the poems of Leopardi...

national poetry month

Farrar, Straus & Giroux are sending out a daily poem through the end of April. You can sign up here .

eudaimonia

Selfishness, good health and stupidity are, Flaubert suggested, the prerequisites of happiness. But without the last, he added, happiness is...

eheu fugaces labuntur anni

The bigger, more headache-inducing Atari programming challenge was dealing with the TV. The cathode ray tube screens of the late '70s an...

do you admire the view?

Peter Singer, for his part, showed some flexibility when I e-mailed him about this piece. "I've gone back and forth on this over th...

to say nothing of salad bars

Let's get something straight: A vegetarian is someone who doesn't eat meat. It's not someone who loves vegetables. Ezra Klein o...

The individuation begins as soon as the sound waves conveying the gunshot traverse the two meters or so between the speakers and the ears of...

hand me the ritalin

(If the idea of a comic about Spinozism and lycanthropy in eighteenth-century central Europe sounds the least bit interesting, you really ne...

Congratulations!

The Last Samurai is now a "New and Noteworthy" book at the [bookstore] in the [x] Building! I had to move the new DeLillo ...

moral hazard cashed out

This objection errs in assuming that the moral hazard problem requires an explicit intention on the part of economic agents to take on more ...

let's call the calling off off?

[There] are many... cases where competition does not restrain monopoly as it is supposed to, but comforts and bolsters it by unburdening it...

town and country

The Tories won’t have forgotten one of the most amazing facts about the 2005 election. In England they actually beat Labour by 57,000 votes...

talking points

This kind of interviewing, in my view, is broken. Apart from the pointless rudeness, Kinnock can’t possibly answer the question by saying ...

i don't want a holiday in the sun

Video clip on the Guardian of Tim Jonze talking about Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols. Jonze says he once interviewed Mc...

St T

I think something short-circuits inside a kid when his parents abandon him to a whole lot of other kids. Rupert Everett, interviewed by Car...

ego glue

For many years I have worked with children and their families as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Before that however, I worked in the ...

possible worlds

While in Boston I had dinner with a friend who teaches philosophy. My friend had told me a long time ago that she had taught her children to...

¿Ana María Khan, where are you?

Happy to give an interview, but got this unenthusiastic response from the Mailer-Daemon: This is the mail system at host mf21.mfg.siteprot...

moral hazard revisited

Alex Tabarrok draws attention to a paper by Richard Squire in the Harvard Law Review: If liability on a firm’s contingent debt is especiall...